In the Scottish Highlands is a mystery that has intrigued the world for generations: the Loch Ness monster; real or just a local fable, preserved to lure in the tourist dollar? One man, Nessie hunter Steve Feltham, is a believer – so much so he left his job, house, and girlfriend to dedicate his life to proving the creature’s existence. Steve Feltham lives in a caravan on the shore of Loch Ness, and makes clay figurines of Nessie to help fund his dream.

Click player below to listen to the interview.

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Excerpts from the interview:

RACHAEL BROWN: What’s the most convincing evidence that you’ve seen or heard so far?

STEVE FELTHAM: Best thing was the end of last summer, there was a sonar contact in Urquhart Bay taken by Marcus Atkinson. He operates a fast boat on the loch taking tourists around, and he dropped the tourists at Urquhart Castle, then he waits in the bay there for 20 minutes, half an hour, whilst they have a walk around the castle.

And whilst he was there he was watching his echo sounder screen. He was in very deep water, but about 60 feet down, underneath the boat, something passed underneath the boat which the machine showed as five feet wide – so the height of a person wide, this thing.

You can’t tell how long that object is because he doesn’t know if it was going with the boat or against the boat.

RACHAEL BROWN: But is that how you imagine it? A big fat eel-like creature?

First of all, this species’ name is wels (what just means “catfish” in German), not Wales Catfish. They are NOT the largest freshwater of the world, they do not grow bigger than 3 m as many people think and they do especially not grow very large in cold water.

dconstrukt: The photo to which I think you refer has, to the best of my knowledge, never been definitively debunked. There do appear to be odd things about it. The one I recall is that the neck seems to be slightly transparent. Certainly hoaxed photos have been with us for a long, long time – almost as long as photography has existed. There seems to be no limit to the devious machinations of the human character.

gorilin (your name sounds like what would give gorillas their flavor): if lake monsters “evolved” from plesiosaurs, etc., shouldn’t we expect them to look less like plesiosaurs (etc.)? I mean, certain dinosaurs evolved and became birds; wouldn’t evolved marine dinosaurs now look less like their ancestors? I’m not disputing that lake monsters could be dinosaurs, just that they are modern dinosaurs evolved from: dinosaurs.

Goodfoot; plesiosaurs and other extinct marine reptiles are not dinosaurs. Plesiosaurs specifically belong to an entirely separate group of extinct reptiles more closely related to modern lizards and snakes than dinosaurs. Still, an additional 65 million years of evolution does not require much change for an animal already adapted to its environment, there are many species alive today that have changed very little in several million years if not hundreds. Birds are dinosaurs that is correct but fully modern groups of birds lived alongside dinosaurs and they too have changed little.

If Nessie is anything it is an unusually large fish but more likely it is a combination of animals and environmental occurrence which basically means…it does not exist.